The Migration Period

Around 285 Tuyuhun, elder half-brother of the Murong Xianbei chief Murong Hui, quarrelled with him after their horses fought and led his people west from Liaodong to the Yin Mountains; during the Yongjia disorders (307–313) they crossed the Long mountains to the upper Yellow River. There the people named Tuyuhun after him built a kingdom that ruled the Kokonor region for more than three centuries.

From 291 to 306 princes of the Sima clan fought for control of the developmentally disabled Emperor Hui, and palace coups in Luoyang grew into a civil war across northern China. The war exhausted the Western Jin and opened the way for the risings of the northern peoples that cost the dynasty the north.

In the autumn of 304, while the Jin princes fought over the emperor, Liu Yuan, a noble of the Southern Xiongnu serving Prince Sima Ying at Ye, returned to the Xiongnu in Shanxi and was proclaimed Grand Chanyu; within twenty days he had 50,000 men, and by the winter he declared himself King of Han. His rising began the “upheaval of the Five Barbarians” and the Sixteen Kingdoms period, when peoples settled in the north took power there.

From 307, when Sima Rui, Prince of Langya, took up his command at Jianye (Jiankang) with Wang Dao as his adviser, and above all after the fall of Luoyang in 311, northern officials, great families and whole communities fled across the Huai and the Yangtze. Settled in “lodged” commanderies named after their lost homes, the émigrés became the ruling elite of the Eastern Jin and of the southern dynasties that followed.

On 13 July 311 troops of Han-Zhao, the state founded by the Southern Xiongnu, stormed Luoyang, the capital of the Western Jin: they captured Emperor Huai, killed the crown prince and, by the chronicles, more than 30,000 people, and burned the city. The fall of the capital was the turning point in the Jin loss of northern China.

In the autumn of 316 the Han-Zhao general Liu Yao besieged Chang’an, where the last emperor of the Western Jin, Sima Ye (Emperor Min), held out with a starving garrison. On 11 December 316 the emperor rode out of the city in a goat cart, bare to the waist and with his coffin carried behind him, to surrender: the fall of the second capital ended the Western Jin and left northern China to the “Five Barbarians”.

In the winter of 319–320 Shi Le, a former slave of the Jie people who had become the strongest general of Han-Zhao, broke with its ruler Liu Yao and proclaimed himself King of Zhao at Xiangguo. In 329 he destroyed Liu Yao’s Former Zhao and in 330 took the imperial title: the Later Zhao of the Jie ruled most of northern China until its bloody collapse in 350–351.

Around 350 an invasion of nomads on the eastern frontier forced Shapur II to break off his war with Rome. Ammianus Marcellinus, the first to name the Chionites, says that in 356 the king was wintering in their lands and those of the Euseni, and that in 358 he made an alliance with the Chionites and the Gelani; the next year the Chionite king Grumbates marched with him against Rome.

In the decades before the Huns arrived, Ermanaric, king of the Greuthungian Goths, ruled wide and fertile lands north of the Black Sea; his contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus calls him a most warlike king feared by his neighbours. Two centuries later Jordanes made him a Gothic Alexander who had subdued the Heruli, the Venethi, the Aesti and many peoples of the north — a picture that many historians consider exaggerated.

After the nomad invasions of the mid-4th century Bactria passed from the Sasanian Kushanshahs to Hunnic rulers: Armenian sources tell of a “king of the Kushans” at Balkh who repeatedly defeated the Persians, in events dated to 368–379. The dynasty named after Kidara took the old title Kushanshah, extended its rule to Gandhara and probably part of Sogdiana, and held Bactria until 467, when the Sasanians, probably with the Hephthalites, drove it out.

Wulfila (Ulfilas), bishop of the Christian Goths who had settled in Roman Moesia, devised an alphabet for their language and led the translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic — the earliest substantial text in any Germanic language and the Scripture of the Goths, who accepted Christianity in its Arian form.

In the early 370s the Huns crossed the Volga, subdued the Alans on the Don and destroyed the realm of the Greuthungian king Ermanaric, setting off the flight of the Goths to the Danube in 376 — the beginning of the Great Migration in Europe.

Fleeing the Huns, the Thervingian Goths were admitted across the Danube in 376; ill-treated by Roman officials, they rebelled, destroyed the eastern army at Adrianople and in 382 were settled inside the empire as allies under their own leaders.

According to Jordanes, the Gothic king Vinitharius, a vassal of the Huns, defeated the Antes and crucified their king Boz with his sons and seventy nobles — the earliest episode in which the Antes appear, though its reliability is questioned.

The Goths led by Fritigern destroyed the army of the eastern emperor Valens, who was killed; the defeat showed that Rome could no longer drive out a barbarian people settled on its soil.

In 383 Fu Jian, who had united northern China under the Former Qin, invaded the Eastern Jin with a huge army, but in the winter, on the Fei River near Shouyang, a much smaller Jin force under Xie Shi and Xie Xuan routed his vanguard. The Qin army disintegrated, the Former Qin broke up, and southern China kept its independence for two more centuries.

On 20 February 386, at a great assembly at Niuchuan, the fourteen-year-old Tuoba Gui restored Dai, the state of the Tuoba Xianbei destroyed ten years earlier by the Former Qin, and that summer renamed it Wei. Having crushed the Later Yan, he conquered the plain of Hebei and in 398 moved his capital south to Pingcheng (Datong), deporting great numbers of people there: the Northern Wei, which would unite the north, had moved from the steppe edge into China.

After the death of Theodosius I the Gothic federates led by Alaric rose in revolt, marched on Constantinople and then plundered Thessaly, Attica and the Peloponnese. In 397 Stilicho trapped them in Elis but let them escape to Epirus, and the eastern court bought Alaric off with a Roman command in Illyricum.

In the summer of 395, while the Roman field army was still in Italy, Hunnic horsemen from the steppes north of the Caucasus crossed the mountains and ravaged Roman Armenia, Cappadocia, Cilicia and Syria, besieging Antioch. Another band under Basich and Kursich rode down the Euphrates and the Tigris towards the Persian capital Ctesiphon but was overtaken by a Persian army. It was the Huns’ first large-scale attack on the Eastern Roman Empire.

In 402 the Rouran leader Shelun, who had united the nomads north of the Gobi, proclaimed himself khagan, making the title for the first time that of the supreme ruler of the steppe. For a century and a half the Rouran dominated the steppe north of China — under Shelun from Karasahr in the Tarim Basin to the borders of Korea — and waged repeated wars with the Northern Wei, until their own Turkic vassals overthrew them in 552.

A great Gothic host led by King Radagaisus came from the middle Danube across the Alps and ravaged northern Italy until Stilicho, reinforced by Hunnic and Gothic auxiliaries, surrounded it in the hills of Faesulae above Florence. Radagaisus surrendered and was executed on 23 August 406.

Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine frontier into Gaul, which they plundered for nearly three years before moving on to Spain; the Rhine defences of the Western Empire were never restored.

In the autumn of 409 the Vandals, Alans and Suebi, who had been plundering Gaul since they crossed the Rhine, broke through the Pyrenees into Spain. After two years of devastation they made peace in 411 and shared out most of the Spanish provinces among themselves by lot.

Alaric’s Visigoths entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and plundered it for three days — the first time in almost 800 years that the city had fallen to a foreign enemy.

The Roman general Constantius recalled the Visigoths from their war in Spain and settled them as federates in Aquitaine, in the Garonne valley from Toulouse to the Atlantic. There grew the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, which lasted until 507.

Gaiseric led the Vandals and Alans from Spain into Africa in 429 and in 439 seized Carthage, founding a kingdom that deprived the Western Empire of its richest provinces.

In 429 Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei, backed by his adviser Cui Hao against most of the court, crossed the Gobi with light cavalry and took the Rouran by surprise on the Li (Ongi) River. Khagan Datan burned his tents and fled, his people scattered, and the Wei history counts more than 300,000 households that surrendered; Datan died soon afterwards.

From the early 5th century, as Roman rule ended, Germanic settlers from the lands between the Rhine delta and Jutland — Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others — settled in eastern and southern Britain. Their language and culture, which many Britons adopted, grew into the Anglo-Saxon England of Old English and many small kingdoms.

When the Burgundians of King Gundahar, federates on the middle Rhine, attacked the Roman province of Belgica, Aetius defeated them in 435, and in 436 or 437 Hunnic troops in Roman service destroyed their kingdom, killing the king and, according to Hydatius, 20,000 of his people. The catastrophe became the core of the legend of the Nibelungs.

On 18 October 439, after a siege of seven weeks, Juqu Mujian, ruler of the Northern Liang, surrendered his capital Guzang in the Hexi Corridor to Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei. With the last of the Sixteen Kingdoms gone, all of northern China was united under the Tuoba dynasty of the Xianbei, and the north entered the period of the Northern dynasties.

In 441 the Huns of Attila and his brother Bleda crossed the Danube and sacked the frontier cities of Illyricum; in 447 Attila, now sole ruler, destroyed an eastern army on the Utus and ravaged the Balkan provinces as far as Thermopylae. The empire bought peace with 6,000 pounds of gold and a yearly tribute of 2,100 pounds.

Six or seven years after the Huns had destroyed their kingdom on the Rhine, the surviving Burgundians were settled by the Roman authorities in Sapaudia, the country around Lake Geneva, to share it with the native population. From there they built a new kingdom in the Rhône valley.

Theodosius II tried to win the chiefs of the Akatziri, a people of the steppe north of the Black Sea, away from Attila with gifts, but their senior chief Kuridach, slighted in the sharing-out, called in the Huns. According to Priscus, Attila’s army killed or subdued the other chiefs, and the Akatziri were given Attila’s eldest son as their king.

According to the Chinese histories, the Ashina — the future royal clan of the Turks — fled to the Rouran with 500 families after the Northern Wei destroyed the Northern Liang in 439 and lived for generations on the southern slopes of the Altai as the Rouran’s ironworkers. The helmet-like shape of the mountain, the same histories say, gave the people its name, Türk.

In the 5th–7th centuries cultures of small villages with semi-sunken houses, hand-made pottery and cremation burials spread across the forest-steppe and Polesia — the first archaeological cultures whose Slavic character is generally accepted.

In the 5th and 6th centuries many Britons, chiefly from Devon and Cornwall, crossed the Channel to the Armorican peninsula of Gaul. They brought their Celtic language and their saints, and the land took from them the name of Brittany.

A Roman–Visigothic coalition under Aetius fought Attila’s army of Huns and subject peoples to a bloody draw in Champagne, and Attila withdrew from Gaul.

A year after his check in Gaul, Attila invaded northern Italy, took and razed Aquileia after a long siege and occupied Milan and Pavia. By the Mincio he received an embassy led by Pope Leo I and withdrew; famine, disease in his army and an eastern Roman attack on his lands beyond the Danube also weighed on his decision.

Attila died suddenly early in 453, on the night of his wedding, and his sons quarrelled over the inheritance. In 454 the subject peoples led by Ardaric, king of the Gepids, rose against them and won a bloody battle on the river Nedao in Pannonia, where Attila’s eldest son Ellac fell; the Hunnic empire in Europe fell apart.

Gaiseric’s Vandals landed from Africa and plundered Rome for two weeks, carrying off its treasures and the widowed empress; Pope Leo I persuaded them to spare the city from fire and slaughter.

Around 455–460, or perhaps a few years earlier while still a prince, Skandagupta, son of Kumaragupta I, drove back the Hunas — Central Asian ‘Huns’, probably the Kidarites of Gandhara and the Punjab — who had invaded north-western India. His pillar inscription at Bhitari says that the earth shook when he ‘joined in close conflict with the Hunas’; the next great Huna invasion came only at the end of the century.

Around 463 envoys of the Saragurs, Urogi and Onogurs came to Constantinople. According to Priscus, these peoples had been driven from their lands by the Sabirs, who had themselves been expelled by the Avars, and the Saragurs had won new pastures by defeating the Akatziri. Historians see them as among the first Oghur Turkic peoples in Eastern Europe and as forerunners of the Bulgars.

After a long war with the Kidarite king Kunkhas, the Sasanian king Peroz, probably with the help of the Hephthalites, drove the Kidarites from their capital, possibly Balkh, and briefly struck his own gold coins there. The Kidarites held on in Gandhara, while their former vassals, the Hephthalites, soon became masters of Bactria and the leading power of Central Asia.

The great joint expedition of the eastern and western empires against the Vandals ended in disaster off Cape Bon, where Gaiseric’s fire ships destroyed much of Basiliscus’s fleet during a truce. The defeat drained the treasury of Constantinople and left the Western Empire without hope of recovering Africa.

The Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus, and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople — the conventional end of the Western Roman Empire.

From the late 5th century to the 550s the Hephthalites, the “White Huns” who had taken Bactria from the Kidarites, ruled an empire stretching from the borders of Persia across Sogdiana to the oases of the Tarim Basin. They killed the Persian king Peroz in 484, made the Sasanians pay tribute and put Kavad I back on his throne, and sent embassies to the Northern Wei and the Liang, until the Turks and the Sasanians destroyed them between 557 and 567.

On 1 February 484 the bishops of the Nicene (Catholic) church of Vandal Africa, summoned by King Huneric, met the Arian clergy at Carthage for a debate presided over by the Arian patriarch Cyrila. The meeting broke down, and later that month Huneric turned the imperial laws against heretics on the Catholics, exiling bishops and closing their churches — a severe persecution.

Seeking revenge for two earlier defeats, the Sasanian king Peroz I marched against the Hephthalites, but his army was ambushed — probably near Balkh — and destroyed, and he was killed. The Hephthalites plundered the eastern provinces and took the cities of Khorasan, and Iran paid them tribute for decades.

The young Frankish king Clovis, with his kinsman Ragnachar, defeated Syagrius, ruler of the last Roman enclave in northern Gaul, and took Soissons. The Frankish realm roughly doubled in size and reached the Loire, the border of the Visigothic kingdom.

In 487, after the Rouran khagan Doulun ignored their advice and raided the Northern Wei frontier, the Gaoche chiefs Afuzhiluo and his cousin Qiongqi led more than 100,000 tents west and set up their own state north-west of the Turfan oasis. The secession of these Tiele subjects weakened the Rouran and created a new power on the routes between the steppe and the Tarim oases.

Commissioned by the emperor Zeno to overthrow Odoacer and rule Italy on the emperor’s behalf, Theodoric led his Ostrogoths and their families out of Novae on the Danube. Their departure ended fifteen years in which the Goths had alternately served and plundered the Eastern Empire in the Balkans.

Sent to Italy by the emperor Zeno, Theodoric and his Ostrogoths besieged Odoacer in Ravenna for two and a half years; after the city surrendered, Theodoric killed Odoacer and became master of Italy.

In September 493 Emperor Xiaowen led a vast army south from Pingcheng, ostensibly against the Southern Qi; at Luoyang, the ancient capital ruined in 311, his ministers begged him to halt, and he made them accept a move of the capital instead. Over the next three years the court and the Xianbei nobility settled in Luoyang, while edicts banned Xianbei dress and speech at court and replaced Xianbei surnames with Chinese ones, the imperial Tuoba becoming the Yuan.

In 493–496 landowners near Tébessa, on the southern fringe of Vandal Africa, wrote sales and other private acts in Latin on wooden tablets; the dated acts use the regnal years of King Gunthamund, as reported for the corpus. Found in 1928, the 34 documents on 45 tablets show olive-growing, irrigation and legal forms that continued in the Roman manner far from Carthage.

In 496 the Sasanian nobility and priesthood deposed Kavad I, whose support for radical reform had alarmed them, and crowned his brother Jamasp. Kavad escaped to the Hephthalites, who had once held him hostage, and in 498 or 499 returned with their army and recovered the throne, beginning a second reign of more than thirty years.

Around 500 the Alchon Huns, masters of Gandhara and the Punjab, broke into the Gupta lands under their king Toramana, who took Malwa, pushed into Gujarat and styled himself king of kings. Checked in 515, the Huns returned under his son Mihirakula until the Aulikara king Yashodharman defeated him around 530. These ‘Hunnic wars’ hastened the collapse of the Gupta Empire and left northern India divided among regional kingdoms.

Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptized by Bishop Remigius at Reims with some 3,000 of his warriors, choosing Catholic Christianity rather than the Arianism of the other Germanic kings.

Near Poitiers the Catholic Frankish king Clovis defeated the Arian Visigoths, and their king Alaric II was killed, according to Gregory of Tours by Clovis himself. Within a year or two the Franks and their allies took most of Gaul between the Loire and the Pyrenees, and the Visigothic kingdom became essentially a Spanish one.

In 523–524 the soldiers of the six garrisons on the Northern Wei steppe frontier — Xianbei and other tribesmen who felt abandoned after the court moved to Luoyang — rose under Poliuhan Baling. The Wei crushed them in 525 only with the help of the Rouran and dispersed some 200,000 garrison people in Hebei, where they rebelled again under Du Luozhou and Ge Rong; the risings, ended by Erzhu Rong in 528, broke the power of the Northern Wei.

Around 530 Yashodharman, the Aulikara king of Dashapura (Mandsaur) in western Malwa, defeated the Alchon Hun king Mihirakula, apparently at the head of a coalition of Indian rulers. On two huge victory pillars near Mandsaur his poet proclaimed that Mihirakula, who had bowed to no one but Shiva, now worshipped at Yashodharman’s feet, and that the king ruled lands that even the Guptas had not held and the Huns had never reached.

Belisarius’ expedition destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa in a single campaign and returned the former Roman provinces with Carthage to the empire — the first success of Justinian’s reconquest.

Twenty years of war in which the armies of Justinian destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom and restored imperial rule over Italy, at the cost of devastating the peninsula.

In the first month of 552 by the Chinese calendar, Bumin (Tumen), chief of the Ashina Turks and a vassal of the Rouran, routed his overlords north of Huaihuang on the Chinese frontier; the Rouran khagan Anagui took his own life, and Bumin proclaimed himself Illig Qaghan. The Turkic Khaganate thus founded soon became the first steppe empire to stretch from Manchuria to the Black Sea.

Around 550 two authors in Constantinople gave the first detailed accounts of the Slavs: Jordanes placed the Sclaveni and the Antes between the Vistula, the Danube and the Dnieper, and Procopius described their way of life and their god of lightning.

Fleeing the Turks, the Avars reached the steppes north of the Caucasus and, through the Alan chief Sarosius and the Roman commander in Lazica, sent envoys to Constantinople. The head of the embassy, Kandikh, offered Justinian the alliance of the “invincible” Avars in return for gifts, yearly payments and land; the emperor sent rich gifts and an envoy to turn them against the empire’s enemies — the beginning of Avar–Byzantine relations.

Kutrigur horsemen under their leader Zabergan, joined by Slavs, crossed the frozen Danube and raided Thrace, reaching Thermopylae, the Gallipoli peninsula and the outskirts of Constantinople. The aged Belisarius, with a few hundred veterans and armed peasants, ambushed Zabergan at Melantias and drove him back; Justinian then ransomed the captives and set the Utigurs against the Kutrigurs.

Soon after reaching the Pontic steppe, the Avars plundered the Antes; when the Antes sent the noble Mezamir to ransom captives, the khagan had him killed — an episode recorded by Menander Protector.

Some time between 557 and 567 — the date is disputed — the Turks of the yabghu Istämi and the Sasanian king Khosrow I attacked the Hephthalites from two sides and crushed them in a great battle in Sogdiana. The Hephthalite empire broke up into small principalities, and the Oxus (Amu Darya) became the frontier between the Turks, who took Sogdiana, and Persia.

Allied with the Lombards, the Avars of khagan Bayan destroyed the kingdom of the Gepids and, when the Lombards left for Italy, took over the whole Carpathian Basin, where their khaganate ruled for more than two centuries.

Led by King Alboin, the Lombards and their allies left Pannonia and within four years conquered most of northern Italy from the Byzantines, founding a kingdom that lasted until 774.

In 576 the Byzantine envoy Valentinus, bringing news of Tiberius’s elevation to Caesar, found the Turkic prince Turxanthus mourning his father Istämi and furious at the empire’s treaty with the Avars. Turxanthus sent an army under Bochan which, together with the Utigurs of Anagai, took the Byzantine city of Bosporus (Kerch) — the open break of the Turkic–Byzantine alliance and the arrival of Turkic power in the Crimea.

From the late 6th century the Slavs no longer only raided across the Danube but settled south of it. Often in alliance with the Avars, they overran Thrace, Macedonia and Greece and besieged Thessalonica again and again, and after the Danube frontier collapsed in the early 7th century much of the Balkans became Slavic.

For twenty years Emperor Maurice fought to hold the Danube frontier against the Avars of khagan Bayan and the Slavs. After peace with Persia in 591 his generals carried the war across the Danube and defeated the Avars in their own land, but in 602 the army, ordered to winter beyond the river, mutinied and overthrew him.

In 602, in retaliation for the Antes’ alliance with Byzantium, the Avar khagan sent his general Apsich to destroy them; after this campaign the Antes disappear from the sources.

According to the Frankish chronicle of Fredegar, a Frankish merchant named Samo joined the revolt of the Wends — Slavs subject to the Avars — was elected their king and ruled for thirty-five years; in 631 or 632 his Slavs routed the army of King Dagobert I at Wogastisburg. His realm, probably centred in Moravia and neighbouring lands, is the first Slavic polity known from written sources.

While Emperor Heraclius campaigned in the East, the Avar khagan with Slav and Bulgar allies besieged Constantinople in concert with a Persian army across the Bosporus; the Byzantine fleet kept them apart, and the siege failed.

Between 634 and 640 Kubrat, lord of the Onogundur Bulgars, rose against the Avar khagan and drove his troops out of his land, then made a lasting peace with Heraclius, who sent him gifts and the title of patrician. Byzantine writers later called the Bulgar union he led between the Sea of Azov and the Kuban “old Great Bulgaria”.

Some time after 642 a nomad ruler was buried, or his treasure laid in the ground, in the sand dunes near Poltava with about 25 kg of gold and 50 kg of silver: Byzantine and Sasanian vessels, a gold-sheathed sword, belt sets and some seventy Byzantine gold coins. Two gold rings whose Greek monograms have been read as “of Kubrat” and “of Kubrat the patrician” have led many historians to see here the grave of the founder of Great Bulgaria.

Khan Asparuh’s Bulgars routed the army of Constantine IV at Ongal in the Danube Delta, crossed the river and, allied with the local Slavs, founded a state that Byzantium recognized by treaty in 681.